1. Field
The systems and methods disclosed herein relate generally to file systems and more specifically to systems and methods for reading objects in a file system.
2. Description of the Related Art
The amount of data stored on digital computing systems has increased dramatically in recent years. Accordingly, users have become increasingly reliant on the storage devices of these computing systems to safely store this data. In order to preserve a copy of the data in case of loss, many users routinely copy some or all of the contents of the storage devices to a backup or archival storage device.
The data stored on the storage devices may be organized as electronic files in a file system. The files may be grouped into directories, with some directories including other directories and/or files. During a backup process, the system typically traverses some or all of the file system to read individual files for transfer to the backup device. However, problems may occur when reading a file system from the storage devices. For example, if the file system includes a large number of relatively small files, the backup system may be latency bound while waiting for each of the individual files to be read from the storage device. Because of the foregoing challenges and limitations, there is a need to provide systems and methods for reading files in a file system.